Quiet talent behind the Beatles

George Harrison was the quiet, mystic Beatle whose talent was often overshadowed by the colossal achievements of his bandmates.

But his low profile - both within the band and since - masked his often spectacular input into the Fab Four's career.

He was behind enough of the group's most beautiful songs - Something, Here Comes The Sun and While My Guitar Gently Weeps - for him to be considered a musical genius in any lesser group.

Harrison was born in 1943 in the Wavetree area of Liverpool. His mother was a housewife and his father a bus driver.

A mediocre student, he showed a keen interest in music from an early age, receiving his first guitar - a gift from his mother - when he was 13.

He formed his own group, called The Rebels, but it was short lived and not long afterwards a schoolfriend called Paul McCartney, invited him to join the Quarry Men - the group which evolved into The Beatles.

In 1960 the group headed for Hamburg to work in the lively club scene but when the authorities discovered that Harrison was only 17 - too young to have a work permit - he was forced to return to England.

While John Lennon and McCartney collaborated in the early days of the band on the songs which would change the face of pop and rock, Harrison worked alone contributing the occasional track to each album.

But it was not until March 1968 that he was allowed to contribute a track to a single, his typically mystical The Inner Light which was the B-side to Lady Madonna. A year and a half later he was rewarded with a double A-side when Something was released with Come Together.

As the band's career took off and they became a major world force, so hisinterest in Far Eastern spirituality began, something which would leave its mark across both the band's music and his own solo career.

At first the influence was subtle with Norwegian Wood's sitar lead line and then more blatant on Within You Without You from Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

He went on to indulge his gifts outside the group with solo albums Wonderwall Music and Electronic Music as well as producing Hare Krishna Mantra for the Radha Krishna Temple, a top 20 track released on the Beatles' own Apple label.

At the same time he was also creating some of his most valuable songs forthe group with both Something - considered by Frank Sinatra to be one of the world's greatest love songs, although he mistakenly thought it was by Lennon and McCartney - and Here Comes The Sun on Abbey Road.

The youngest member of the band, he had long been frustrated by his position playing second fiddle to the band's main writers. He walked out on occasion but returned again to the fold.

The track Only A Northern Song on Yellow Submarine was widely seen as a sideswipe (Northern Songs being the band's publishing company).

Within a year of the band's demise, Harrison was back in the charts with My Sweet Lord and staging charity concerts for Bangladesh in New York.

His next album Living In The Material World had a more muted response than the LP which spawned My Sweet Lord, All Things Must Pass.

This was followed by a poorly received US tour and the album Dark Horse, widely seen as Harrison's creative nadir.

The bleak record also reflected his misery at the collapse of his first marriage to model Patti Boyd.

She left him for his once good friend, the guitarist Eric Clapton, who had played lead guitar on Harrison's Beatles track While My Guitar Gently Weeps and performed at the Bangladesh concerts.

Clapton had already paid musical tribute to Boyd on the song Layla.

The end of the Harrisons' marriage led to a bitter feud between the two musicians, which only healed in the past few years.

Harrison went on to find happiness again with Olivia whom he met while touring the US in 1974. She was working in the Los Angeles office of his record company Dark Horse.

Her grandparents were Mexican, but she was brought up in Los Angeles, moving to London shortly after the couple met marrying in 1978.

Career wrangles dogged Harrison during the late Seventies. He was sued by one company for delivering an album late and challenged in a New York court over a copyright issue.

The court found he had unconsciously plagiarised The Chiffons song He's So Fine with his single My Sweet Lord.

He also had a bout of hepatitis, but at least his music was being more warmly accepted.

Harrison branched out into film finance to team up with his comedy heroes the Monty Python team for their movie Life Of Brian.

His Handmade Films company also made many other movies including Time Bandits, The Long Good Friday and Madonnna's Shanghai Surprise.

But the company which was once hailed as the saviour of the British film industry went on make a series of losses and was eventually sold to a Canadian firm.

In 1998 Harrison successfully sued his former business partner and financial manager Denis O'Brien for damages after a series of errors which had lost the firm money.

On the music front, Harrison bounced back to the charts in 1981 with hishomage to murdered Lennon, All Those Years Ago, which also featured McCartney and Ringo Starr.

But the next album Gone Troppo in 1982 again had a luke-warm response and became his last for five years.

Instead he devoted increasing amounts of his time to motor racing and gardening, although he did work with Wombles supremo Mike Batt on his musical The Hunting Of The Snark and on a Greenpeace benefit LP.

After another solo effort Cloud Nine in 1987, which produced hit singles Got My Mind Set On You and When We Was Fab, Harrison teamed up with rock'n'roll luminaries to form the supergroup Traveling (correct) Wilburys.

He featured alongside Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison, Tom Petty and producer and former ELO star Jeff Lynne in the new band, with each assuming a pseudonym.

In 1992 Harrison toured Japan with Clapton - who had become a friend again - and played a concert at the Royal Albert Hall in London in aid of the spiritual Natural Law Party which fielded candidates in that year's General Election.

He revived his partnership with Sir Paul and Starr in the mid 1990s to oversee the Beatles Anthology series of albums and videos. It also saw them collaborating together musically to put flesh on the bones of two detached vocal tracks laid down by Lennon.

There was talk of Harrison being down to his last few million pounds because of HandMade Films losses but the worldwide success of Anthology would certainly have been an adequate cushion.

In 1997 he underwent an operation for a cancerous lump on his neck and underwent weeks of radiation therapy. Afterwards he said: "I got it purely from smoking."

Shortly after Christmas 1999, Harrison was almost fatally wounded when a schizophrenic attacker gained entry to his Oxfordshire home and stabbed him in the chest.

His wife Olivia was credited with saving his life after hitting the attacker with a lamp.

Michael Abram, a father of two, with severe mental problems believed he was on a mission from God when he launched the attack.

He was detained indefinitely in a secure hospital following a two day trial at Oxford Crown Court last November.

Last month health chiefs apologised to Harrison following an inquiry which found significant failings in the care and treatment of Abrams.

While he was still recovering from the attack, his health problems returned and he had to undergo surgery earlier this year to remove a cancerous lump from one of his lungs.

Following the operation, at the Mayo clinic in the United States, he said he had made an excellent recovery and urged his fans not to worry.

But he was forced to undergo more treatment in the summer in Switzerland and the United States as the cancer continued to return. Last month he went to New York where he underwent an experimental cancer treatment in a "last-ditch" attempt to save his life.

The couple had one child Dhani who was born in August 1978, making George Harrison the last of The Beatles to become a father.